Infrared spectroscopy of gas-phase singly deuterated [Trp ϩ K] ϩ (formed by H/D exchange with CH 3 OD) shows that some (ϳ20%) kinetically stable zwitterionic (ZW) conformer is formed, based on the diagnostic antisymmetric CO stretch of the deprotonated carboxylate moiety, as (CO 2 Ϫ ), at 1680 cm Ϫ1 . A majority of the deuterated [Trp ϩ K] ϩ is found to be in the charge solvation (CS) conformation, with deuterium exchange occurring on both the acid and amino groups, which is consistent with H/D scrambling. Interestingly, H/D exchange with the more basic ND 3 reagent did not result in the stabilization of a kinetically stable zwitterion, although it is not clear yet what causes this observation. The result for CH 3 OD shows that H/D exchange can in fact alter the structure of the analyte and, hence, care needs to be taken when interpreting gas-phase H/D exchange studies. Moreover, this result shows the possibility of forming solution-phase structures that are thermodynamically disfavored in the gas phase, thus opening a new area of study. (HDX) is one of the most popular techniques for the structural elucidation of biomolecules in mass spectrometry and has been widely implemented for both solution [1][2][3][4] and gas phase studies [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. In solution, the extent of HDX can be directly related to the solvent accessibility of amino acid residues in proteins. However, in the gas phase there are many structural parameters apart from the surface availability that affect the HDX rates, as illustrated in a recent HDX study on ion-mobilityselected charge states of bovine ubiquitin [17]. Systematic studies on small peptide systems showed that the difference in proton affinity of the biomolecules and deuterated donor reagent plays a crucial role in the HDX mechanism [7][8][9][10]19]. Beauchamp and coworkers [9] suggested that lower basicity reagents, such as D 2 O and CH 3 OD, proceed via a "relay" mechanism [20] for protonated peptides, while the higher basicity ND 3 reagent gives rise to an "onium" mechanism [21]. In the case of amino acids cationized by an alkali metal ion rather than a proton, polar deuterating ligands such as D 2 O can exchange via a similar relay mechanism involving charge solvation-zwitterion (CS-ZW) isomerization [18]. Modeling of observed HDX processes and quantum chemical calculations of the potential surfaces have made a strong circumstantial case that ZW structures are traversed in many cases during HDX with basic partners like D 2 O, CH 3 OD, and ND 3 [14,16,18]. Nevertheless, computations also generally indicate that the bare ZW is sufficiently disfavored energetically that its equilibrium presence in the M ϩ /amino acid would be negligible [22,23].Here, we show unambiguous spectroscopic evidence that bare ZW can in fact be kinetically trapped as a result of the HDX of [Trp ϩ K] ϩ with CH 3 OD. Infrared multiple-photon dissociation (IR-MPD) spectroscopy of metal-tagged amino acids and peptides has already been shown to be a powerful probe for CS ...